|
recent posts
----------
Policy
Side-Effects
Looking Over the Hedge
And the Flowers Are Still Standing!
Independence... Or Something Larger
Lobby Labors
Stop Yelling
The Other Side of the Pancake
A is for...
The Age of Anxiety
archive
----------
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
|
 |
You've got questions, she's got answers. Be among the first to read Elise Mac Adam's new etiquette guide.
Pre-order from:
- Simon & Schuster
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
On Wheels
I suppose if one is a Socialist, one knows that there is no such thing as an innocent purchase, which probably only added to the exquisite delight delight Nancy Mitford- a self-proclaimed Socialist- took in outfitting herself in Dior.
When one becomes a parent, not only is every purchase suspect, every self-righteous so-and-so will feel compelled to conjure an opinion about the rightness or lameness of one's choices. The only response to this is to be amused.
This occurred to me when I noticed the New York Times stirring the pot last week when it ran this zinger of an article, guaranteed to worm its way into the website's right hand column list of "Most E-Mailed" articles. Indeed, the title of the piece says it all: Supersize Strollers Ignite Sidewalk Drama. A little alliteration, and the intimations of bloodless battle, mixed with a whiff of class and privilege are guaranteed to catch even jaded eyes.
You know what this piece is about. I don't need to tell you. Some people hate the large strollers that trundle the streets; stroller users are defensive and it all turns into a story about class or why it's better to be child-free or some other garbage. There is no news here. I think at bottom the article really reveals that it is best not to be a jerk and to apologize when you bump into someone. But that's hardly "news," is it?
Even more amusing was a letter to the editor written by a woman who seemed to want to be applauded for her decision to wear her child, saying that people should think of her behavior as a peaceful gesture, an olive branch between these warring factions. How nice that someone is capable of introducing another supercilious side to the debate.
Politics and privilege aside, strollers trigger all sorts of manias in people.
I know people who collect strollers, who fantasize about the latest and greatest, who know all the lingo. At first, this passion seemed to have been created by the stroller manufacturers who were trying to market to men- thus the super shiny models with exposed suspension systems and all sorts of snap-on attachments. But now that so many possibilities are out there everyone's imaginations have run wild, and it is hard for anyone not to fetishize the kid-mobile.
The stroller harbors so many dreams- of convenience and freedom, safety and speed. How could these not inspire even the most sleep-deprived parent?
Consider the Bugaboo that everyone complains about. All the models are so cheerful and easy to deal with.
But they don't fold up nearly as fast as this European number.
And this one looks weird, but supposedly keeps your kid from feeling inferior (and there's some argument about avoiding fumes, but, really, if you want to avoid fumes, I think the trick is to move to Idaho.)
And then there are the wild twin strollers.
This one supposedly saved a kid's life when a building collapsed around it on upper Broadway in July.
Here's a space saver, though I wonder if it doesn't trigger what seems to me like the inevitable "I get the top bunk" fight.
And then there's the Hartan Z. It's German and while people seem to love it, in the United State one must do all sorts of tricks to get it.
For my part, I confess, I use the Bugaboo Frog. So there. It's a workhorse. I can use it one-handed while I walk the dog. I can hang all sorts of groceries off the back of it, and it doesn't get caught in the cobblestones.
And if I do bump into someone, which I try desperately not to do, I always, always apologize.
Oh and here's a postscript.
There must be something in the zeitgeist because Salon just ran an Object Lust column all about the double decker stroller. Indeed, it sounds fab.
posted by Elise at 12:24 PM
0 Comments
Oh And...
Now that I think my own private shedding has stopped, how long does it take for one's hair to grow back and stop looking so... patchy? It is actually a rather unfortunate look for Fall.
I would dearly love to embark upon some self-improvements, but not if the result will be that I look even more fuzzy than I do already.
posted by Elise at 1:29 PM
0 Comments
Side Effects
If I had thought about it, I would have realized this was going to be the case. In the wake of Felix, the dog has gotten quite plump.
He had a rabies booster shot today and the vet, who never weighs him anyway, gave him the once over saying dryly: "There's a lot of dog here. A bit more than before."
The once-smallish terrier can't know what is about to happen, but you can:
His (already diet) food will be mildly reduced and bulked up with string beans (canned is OK)
He can have unlimited string beans, lettuce and celery.
He can't have so much lamb lung and he can't even have so many of the strange super puffed mostly air diet treats that his Aunt got for him.
This is not a beast who handles moderation well, but he is starting to resemble an ottoman.
And all of this, I have been told, is merely to forestall the inevitable which will happen once Felix realizes (and it will be any moment now, according to the Good Doctor) that the dog will be extremely entertaining if food is thrown to him from the lofty heights of the highchair.
Really, it is one thing to have to maintain one's own intake, but it is another alltogether to be the naysayer with a cute dog. Just yesterday he coiled himself around a tree in the rain in front of a film shoot, desperately begging the people at the craft services table to give him just a little chicken wing, or bowl of cereal.
posted by Elise at 1:21 PM
0 Comments
Musical Interlude
I wonder what the surviving Beatles think about the work they recorded so many years ago. Do they feel at all odd about the way some of their tuned have turned up in infant music class.
This week's set of what I am now calling Selections for Caregivers turned up:
"Octopus's Garden" from Abbey Road
and
Paul Simon's "Feelin' Groovy"
Perhaps they don't mind, but there is something quite odd about singing (or "singing" as the case may be) "Octopus's Garden" as a march.
Then again, I have heard a quite successful hora/polka version of "People Are Strange"
Don't knock it.
posted by Elise at 2:03 PM
0 Comments
Ms. Olds Regrets
I suppose that there really is no such thing as bad publicity, but in the Underwear-as-Outerwear era, turning down an invitation to the National Book Convention's dinner at the Library of Congress seems rather daring.
Sharon Olds just did that and the Nation published the text of the letter she wrote politely sending her regrets to the president's wife.
Generally, I'm not an enormous fan of poets, having had an unfortunate romantic attachment to one who fancied himself rather more than he was at an impressionable age. But I was proud to read this and see how the art of gracious evisceration is not dead.
Here is the letter as the Nation printed it:
Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.
In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.
And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.
So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.
I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.
But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.
What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.
So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS
posted by Elise at 4:15 AM
2 Comments
Inner Child vs. Voice of Reason
Syndicated advice columnist Carolyn Hax writes an interesting advice column, and the Washington Post hosts a weekly live chat with her and archives the transcripts.
Last week, a plaintive so-and-so wrote in about what she felt was the only problem in her marriage, and that was her husband's unwillingness to let them leave their child with a babysitter once in a while:
"What do you do when your spouse doesn't believe in me-time, at ALL? Our child is TWO and my husband and I have yet to have an evening out by ourselves. I've taken a very few blocks of a few hours of me-time (we're talking half a dozen in two years), always offering (pretty much insisting) that my husband take an equal or greater amount of time, but he never has. He says he doesn't need me-time, and that I shouldn't have decided to have a kid if I wanted any. I've pretty much resigned myself to not having any personal time or adults-only/couples time, but I really think that just a few hours once a MONTH would keep stress at bay and help me feel recharged. When I've pressed the issue, he's told me that if I'm going to be an absentee parent, he might as well just divorce me and get full custody and have me pay child support (this is for suggesting a once-a-month break). I definitely don't want a divorce, and we don't have any other problems in our marriage aside from this issue. Should I just let it go?"
Ms. Hax responded sensibly, expressing shock at the man's excessive, hurtful behavior and recommended counseling. (The link provides a transcript of the entire chat session.)
Fair enough, but Yikes- this husband was not alone in his zero to 60 jump to hysteria. A bunch of shrill voices rose up to agree with him, self-righteously proclaiming that it is immoral and neglectful to spend time away from one's child. Untold emotional damage could be done to your baby if you left him or her with a babysitter and selfishly took in a movie. These folks would have the social workers at Child Protective Services working double shifts during holiday time when people commit repeated bits of savagery by going to parties.
I don't think we're floating in a sea of new reactionary ideas. Publishing companies have been cranking out parenting manuals hand over fist for ages, and they've gone through various fashions. There is, though, something that happens- whether it comes from a book or is spun out of the whole cloth of the mind- when rules about being a parent get pronounced: they become religion on earth.
How is kicking up your heels for an evening while your kid snoozes (under the care of a sitter, natch) tantamount to neglect? It isn't, so why internalize the lie? Why force oneself to feel trapped and guilty for even having the urge to get away? Where is the reward? And why is it necessary to compose such extreme and unforgiving standards that deny pleasure if it is connected to anything apart from the family?
Of course being a parent is something, once begun, that never stops. But it is also something that simply is and the privileges won't be terminated (one hopes) because a babysitter comes once in a while. Object permanence is something that infants learn as part of their larger cognitive development. When they're about eight months old, they start to realize that people (and things) can come and go. (And this can lead to problems with separation anxiety, which is another set of problems, but those are generated by the child, not the parents.) It seems as if the adults who refuse to go out on principal are in some way questioning baby permanence. The baby will, of course, persist without them.
This is sacrifice with no point, self-denial with no reward, except the possible possibility that such rigor will bring on such a superior obnoxious attitude that no one will want to invite you to dinner any more after all.
posted by Elise at 8:55 AM
0 Comments
Get that Dander Up, Up, Up
Today, The New York Times has a piece in its Style section (though it is interesting that it didn't appear in the Tuesday Health section) about the ubiquitous but unpleasant What to Expect When You're Expecting. To flip through the book, and glance at the dyspeptic drawings is to know its tone intimately, so if you haven't already been exposed to its holier than thou attitude and are confused about why a book in its third edition that has sold over ten million copies can be so reviled, all you need to know is that my level headed, non-alarmist friend came to call it What to Expect When You're Neurotic during her pregnancy.
I didn't much care for What to Expect, and had much more success with the information and attitudes of Pregnancy For Dummies. (Terrible title, I know, but two of my sister-in-law said that their doctor recommended it, and it was neither wildly doctrinaire nor did it make me feel guilty about my lifestyle, which by What to Expect standards was edgy to the point of being insanely dangerous.)
Anyway, the article touches on a strange phenomenon about What To Expect, which is that, in spite of the book going into new editions and having been revised to get rid of various outrageously alarming tidbits (one edition suggested that oral sex can kill mother and baby, and the "Best Odds Diet" that finally got evicted in the third edition is just insulting) old editions lie around and get passed around, a lot and as a result, the bad information never manages to fade away.
I am a case in point. When my husband and I started to combine our book collections years ago, we were rather surprised to find a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting (early edition) nestled in with the fun stuff, like the Slang Dictionaries. Neither of us would take responsibility for bringing it into the apartment, and its origins remain murky, and then a second copy came after I got pregnant, evicted, I suspect, from the library of a friend. When I was about 20 weeks gone, my insurance company threatened to send me a third, but I managed to fend that one off. I suppose there's no way to tell people that they should always check their editions, and unfortunately the bad versions don't have a self-destruct mechanism, but I wonder why people stick with something that is clearly so problematic. Why embrace a second and third edition if the first was so impractical, superior, and glaringly inaccurate. One might, if one were so inclined, derive some sort of political metaphor from this tendency to stick with something that works so badly and rewards so few.
posted by Elise at 3:14 PM
0 Comments
Bossa Nova in the Morning
For those of you keeping score, the song that the music class threw in to keep the adults from plunging into fits of apoplexy, was "The Girl from Ipanema."
I would love to be the girl that walks like a samba, but this is New York, not Rio.
posted by Elise at 8:02 PM
0 Comments
Indian Summer
And I thought end of August was difficult to get through. Everyone was away, calls went unreturned and projects languished. Now, I'm afraid the beginning of September has been infected by the dregs of last month.
A wedding present I bought in a fit of efficiency for recently eloped friends remains undelivered, in spite of my having had dinner with them last night.
I keep forgetting to give this Irish smoked salmon that I have (it's all vacuum sealed, so stop worrying) to my parents who will love it.
There is a lot on my plate, but I can't seem to shed the late summer tendency to focus on little flyaway things and worry them.
For instance:
Felix is seven months old and is not a cautious child. He sits and crawls, pulls himself up on things and people and tries to shrug off all restraining and cautionary hands. He does this on the floor and he does this in bed.
So tell me, If he is standing up and clinging to the bars of his crib (which, yes, is on the lowest level) now, what do I do when he decides, as I fear he might, to climb out?
I know there is no such thing as a terrarium top for cribs, and since those things frequently don't work very well with hamsters and gerbils anyway, I can't imagine they'd be much good against a creature with greater determination and opposable thumbs.
Any ideas? It's a long way down.
posted by Elise at 4:24 PM
6 Comments
First Semester
I was going to write earlier, but I had to wait for my blood sugar to settle. School is in session and I took Felix to his first music "class" today. I harbor no delusions that he will learn anything or become any sort of prodigy while sitting on a blue carpet surrounded by other infants and adult women singing "Edelweiss." He needs to socialize and when I say "he," I suspect I am really talking about myself. For his part, Felix loved music class. Anything with bubbles, music and a ceiling fan is bound to go over well.
But I have to say, while I was waving my kid around, mouthing the lyrics to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" I couldn't help but wonder if they picked a song off the White Album to placate parents. Or perhaps it's for the teachers. This is apocryphal, but I did once hear that at one of the Disney theme parks insanity was such an occupational hazard of working the ride that plays "It's a Small World" over and over again that the management had to make the shifts very short and rotate employees frequently.
It must be a strange thing to teach these music classes- or any infant class for that matter. They have to perform for students who have very limited means by which they can demonstrate appreciation and the chances of the class content making the parents and caregivers feel like jumping out the window are pretty high. They must possess a certain ineffable kid charisma that doesn't grate on adults, and on top of these personality requirements, they need to be able to sing and play an assortment of musical instruments while encouraging little hands to grab them. It's quite a skill set, and I've never met anyone (before today) who has it.
But then again, it is hard to teach adults about children, too. The wonderful birth class I took, taught by someone with great compassion and intelligence, was informative and taught us how to be flexible and prepared, until a substitute teacher showed up for one lesson and put the fear of God into everyone. We went from being reasonable people to paranoid folks when the sub told us that epidurals resulted in children who never bond with their parents and the use of any narcotic painkillers created future drug addicts, according to a Swedish study she thought she remembered reading somewhere. The magic of the class was in the teacher, not the information.
And just indulge me for a moment while I revisit the horror, the horror that was CPR class. The teacher is someone who is clearly afraid of everything, and who embraced thinking about these fears all the time professionally as a means of dealing with her terror. This is a woman who still co-sleeps with her ten-year-old ("Now I would encourage early promiscuity") on a hard mat, and who will teach the Heimlich maneuver to any parent at whose house her kid might play. Unfortunately, her version of total-immersion, face-your-fears self-therapy makes for a terrible class, which one leaves trembling, afraid of the day one's child might eat anything more solid than squashed peaches and pulverized whatnots. The angst is receding, but I was relieved to know I wasn't alone in being frightened. By coincidence two of my sisters-in-law took the same class with the same woman two years ago and came away similarly freaked and mad.
At any rate, that was just a one-off. The music class will go on for weeks, and soon Felix and I will hit the pool together for some sort of infant swimming scenario, about which I have concerns of the bathing suit variety. The hope is that I will learn how to be responsible with him in the water and he will, in turn, not be too afraid of it. It seems so funny that education can start so early but I think one always feels simultaneously eager for the kid to start learning and uncomfortable that things are happening too fast.
While walking the dog this morning, a family toddled past me. The little boy was wearing brand new shades, backpack, sneakers and baseball cap. His father stooped beside him, holding a camcorder at kid's eye level, and his mother walked a pace or two ahead saying: "Who's my little kindergartener?"
posted by Elise at 12:49 PM
5 Comments
Yes, Katrina
UPDATE:
If you want to donate to an animal cause the American Veterinary Medical Foundation has a matching program, which effectively doubles your donation. They can be reached through their web site or:
American Veterinary Medical Foundation
Department 20-1122
P.O. Box 5940
Carol Stream, IL 60197
with "Animal Disaster Relief and Response Fund" written on the check's note section.
Now,
There is nothing I can say here that will illuminate or make the disaster and its hideous aftermath any more comprehensible.
But it is shocking how terribly the government has handled this nightmare. As a friend, an American in Paris, wrote to me recently, "Even the French are stunned by the situation, and they've never had much faith in the American system."
Way before I arrived on the scene, my father apparently told someone who took a tumble on ice skates (or skis, that detail is murky) she should "walk it off." As it happened, the poor woman had a broken leg. I won't strain the metaphor, but it does seem that a lot of folks are being told to work through the pain right now by a government that isn't inclined to believe in mortal wretchedness.
The Shakespeare's Sister blog has an interesting entry about this administration's push for small government and what a disaster it is in situations like this one where people really need help and the people who are most desperate are the ones for whom self-reliance is utterly insufficient. This shouldn't be a world so lacking in forgiveness or empathy, where anything that can be interpreted as "weakness" is deserving of punishment. In this administration's philosophy, it is almost a point of pride that the government leaves its citizens to their own devices and shrugs its shoulders when the folks it finds uninteresting or ugly or useless suffer and die in the wake of natural disaster.
I don't think I've ever seen the expression "fiddling while Rome burns" taken literally, but the antics of the Bush administration this week come pretty close. Bush and Cheney continued their vacations undaunted by worsening catastrophes, though Bush did eventually cut his break short by two (count 'em) days. Here, on the island of Manhattan, Condoleezza Rice was living the high life, attending the Broadway show Spamalot (where she apparently got razzed when the lights went up), and playing around at the U.S. Open, ignoring completely how harsh and Marie Antoinette-ish her behavior might seem, until her subsequent several thousand-dollar shoe spree was interrupted by an outraged New Yorker. I usually prefer decorum, but when I read about the Railing Shopper, I had a tiny surge of pride.
It does matter how people conduct themselves. As Maureen Dowd wrote in her column, it is one thing to be faced with a lack of empathy from one's government, it is another thing to have this meanness matched by utter ineptitude, and I suspect that the hollowness that accompanies the sadness I feel is exacerbated by the sense that the people most capable of improving the situation, saving lives, reuniting families and providing calm and helpful resources are leaving everyone to sink or swim.
These are widely available, but here are some links to help:
NAACP Disaster Relief Efforts
Oxfam
Charity Navigator
The Humane Society
Noah's Wish
And if anyone knows of a good place that needs a box of (adult women's) clothes, please let me know.
posted by Elise at 9:52 AM
0 Comments
........................................................
|
